Marine

Our portfolio of customers in the marine sector includes shipyards and naval engineering consultants dealing with hydrodynamic optimisation of ship hull forms and propulsion systems, as well as construction and civil engineering companies responsible for the design of costal and offshore structures. The main CFD tools employed for this type of applications are HELYX and HELYX-Marine. The HELYX-Marine add-on module has been developed by ENGYS in conjunction with Prof. Kevin Maki of the Department of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering of the University of Michigan and has been validated across various hull forms. These include displacement, planing, mono and multi-hulls, and it has been applied to both industrial applications and research projects, including the globally recognized JoRes project for ship and model scale CFD validation.

Understanding a ship's performance in waves is crucial for ship design. The HELYX-Marine add-on module also features a transient 6DoF solver and dedicated utilities to simulate seakeeping conditions in oblique and head sea states. This includes a library of both regular and irregular waves. With the HELYX-Marine seakeeping solver, users can calculate a ship's response in terms of body motion and added resistance across a range of wave conditions. Given that seakeeping simulations are time-accurate, the open-source nature of the HELYX-Marine solver ensures efficient scalability, particularly when High-Performance Computing (HPC) facilities are employed.

CFD simulation of the Kriso Container Ship (KCS) in head waves using HELYX-Marine.

HELYX-Marine provides advanced models for self-propulsion, allowing the reproduction of typical propulsion test condition. This enables naval architects to calculate values for thrust deduction factor, wave fraction, and relative rotative efficiency of the propeller. For full-scale conditions, HELYX-Marine offers a cost-effective alternative to expensive sea trials when it comes to measure ship performance in terms of speed-power curves as required for example in the EEXI/EEDI calculation. The module provides flexible options to the end user, offering both a traditional transient sliding mesh approach for the actual propeller and an efficient body-force model based on a PID controller.

Self-propulsion simulation of the JoRes tanker showing the flow pattern around the propeller.